Brilliant: Soaring Science from a Rising Bio Campus.

This thriving, cosmopolitan capital is an engine of futuristic medicine. Equidistant from both U.S. coastal biocorridors – frontiers of bioscience are illuminating here. The rise is real and accelerating. Fact: Silicon Valley and Boston are each 1,600 miles from OKC.

High-profile acquisitions by Novartis, Alexion, Genzyme, Hepalink, Sanofi and others speak volumes to investors and drugmakers about this burgeoning bio hub. Outlier it may be, but the achievements here are saving – and dramatically improving – lives. And the trajectory is making headlines.

Bio Success, Born in OKC

Adding traction are elite collaborations between academia and the industry. Global pharmaceutical giants have found such partnerships to be a more efficient way to capture value than being internally focused. The new model has opened important new avenues for this campus and its scientific innovators – and allows pharmaceutical companies to focus on what they do best – translating the science into marketable medicines.

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation – OMRF – is one of a handful of institutions worldwide selected for a prestigious collaboration with GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) in London.

The company rigorously tours facilities to review promising new discoveries. Then they choose those it sees as the most valuable in the world and there are only 15 worldwide.